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Charlie’s Choice
Weekly Tips to Help You Write,
Publish & Promote Your Work
SELF-PUBLISHING: MAKING YOUR BOOK
AVAILABLE TO THE READING PUBLIC
The advance work is done. Your book is headed to the printer, and will soon appear in print. The real question now becomes, “How will it reach the hands of potential readers?”
Several options are available to you. Your choice depends on the nature and extent of the market you are trying to reach. If your book is designed for a very narrow niche market, you may want to promote and sell from your web site through e-mail marketing that goes directly to your target customers.
You may be reaching for a somewhat broader audience, but are not concerned with selling through a bookstore because your market is still very discrete. You know that general circulation would be a waste (I.E. perhaps a medical treatise or a very specific technical book, etc), so once again you may choose to promote on the Web. However, you may find that since this is a somewhat larger audience, you are spending all of your time packaging and mailing instead of writing new books, and need some help.
Reaching Your Niche Customers
To use your web site as your bookstore effectively, it is essential that you develop a substantial mailing list that includes the vast majority of people interested in the subject your book is about. You use e-mail or snail mail or both to reach them, supplemented, if you have the dollars, by some advertising in the journals that cover the same subject matter.
Once again, you have a choice. You can decide to do all of the distribution of the book yourself or you can retain the services of a fulfillment house. These are companies that provide mailing services. You take the order on your site, notify the fulfillment house, and they package and send out your book.
You must, of course, set up a means of receiving orders and payments. It is possible to use a postal mailing address and/or a telephone number to take orders, but this is an ineffective and time consuming approach and limits your ability to accept credit cards. With a little expertise, either your own or a consultant’s, you can set up a shopping cart on your site in which customers place their orders.
You can, of course, contract directly with individual credit card companies to allow customers to use their cards for payment. But this is ponderous and expensive. Far better is contracting with Pay Pal or a similar merchant company. They are able to service credit card payments, as well as take payments on their own that are automatically deposited into your bank account. You can find a number of options on the Internet by clicking on “Internet Merchant Accounts” in one of the search engines you use.
To do all of this smoothly and minimal effort, you require installation of an auto-responder on your site. That technology automatically notifies your payment collector (Pay Pay or otherwise) of the purchase. Pay Pal in turn sends you a notice that payment has been completed and then you are able to send out the book. Or depending upon the system you develop, either you or the payment processor can then notify the fulfillment house to send the book.
Reaching a Broader Market
When reaching out for a broader market of readers, it makes sense to adopt a much more efficient distribution system. Understand that this larger market can still be niche, even though it is composed of a large population of potential readers. The immediate example that comes to mind is the market for my latest book The Writer Within You. It was written for a market of retirees and other seniors. That’s a massive market, even though it represents a single niche.
Now you must think exclusively in terms not limited just to an automated system of payment collection and fulfillment. You are undoubtedly reaching out for bookstores, libraries, indeed every outlet that can move copies of your book. You need a distributor to do it right. The distributor warehouses your books and maintains a sales staff that visits booksellers and convinces them to add your book to their inventories.
A quality distributor has direct connections to wholesalers, who turn are the intermediaries that actually process orders for your book and ship them to retailers. This sounds overly ponderous I know, but it is the established routine. Booksellers and libraries far prefer to deal with a wholesaler than with individual small distributors or directly with publishers or authors. The two major wholesalers are Ingram, dealing primarily with bookstores, and Baker & Taylor, principally involved with selling to institutions like libraries, schools, government agencies, etc.
The system works very smoothly, but if you are a self-publisher with only one or two books to your credit, you may find it difficult to find a quality distributor or wholesaler. There are a number of smaller national distributors, as well as regional ones. Most can be found by clicking on Book Distributors on your favorite search engine. I bypassed the problem by using Bookmasters as my printer and their distribution division Atlas to move my books. Atlas in turn had close relationships with the key wholesalers, which meant I had no trouble becoming one of their customers.
Booksellers Online and Off
The most widely publicized online bookstore is Amazon.com. It is an excellent resource with availability of a huge selection of titles. Amazon has no physical presence; customers must engage with it over the Internet. It works with a variety of distributors to obtain books, and usually maintains a very limited amount of inventory, calling in titles as they are needed.
Barnes& Noble combines the two basic techniques of book retailing. It is far stronger offline than on, and operates hundreds of retail outlets throughout the country. Borders too follows that pattern of operation.
Independent book stores dot the national landscape. Sadly, far too many Indies have disappeared due to the fierce competition of the “biggies.” Those that are left have survived because of their specialties and because they offer a level of service and caring for their customers that can’t be found elsewhere. As integral parts of their communities, they feel a much deeper responsibility to serve than do absentee owners of the chain stores.
A number of web sites today are devoted to selling books. In some cases, sales are the primary emphasis of the site, while others offer a handful of books in their specialty for sale. The sales plan for your own book should include placing it on as many of these sites as possible, just as you strive to have numbers of physical bookstores include your work in their inventory. However, it has been my experience that these sites don’t produce anywhere near as well as standard booksellers.
Appearances Sell Books
People love to meet authors…and they need not be just those on the best seller lists. Visit bookstores whenever possible, chat with the staffers. Make them aware of the uniqueness of your book so that when customers ask them for recommendations, they think of you. Supplement that by arranging a talk and/or a book signing at the store. We’ll talk more specifically on how to go about this when we deal with the subject of book promotion in a later column.
Libraries, service clubs and organizations constantly seek interesting speakers. Authors who have branded themselves as experts are particularly welcome. Groups usually average, at least in my own experience, anywhere from 20 to as many as 80 or more people. Attendance really depends on the amount of publicity given to the event. Work with the sponsor to promote your talk.
I recently appeared at a large library near my home town. The event coordinator sent me clippings from newspapers on a regular basis. He placed stories in the library’s newsletters and sent out mailings to what he considered a target audience. The result was an overflow crowd, actually too large for the capacity of the room. But in most cases, you’ll have to add your own efforts to the promotion of the event.
In almost every case, you’ll be allowed to set up shop at the end of the talk to sign and sell your book. It is a marvelous opportunity to bypass distributor and wholesaler discounts and improve your profit. It also gives you a chance to interact directly with the customer. That will undoubtedly result in a good deal of word of mouth publicity.
Recognize that without steady promotion, your book will die aborning. When you self-publish, you must be the promoter, the publicist and the marketer unless you hire professionals to do the job. (However, you will recall that past columns have pointed out that even if you go the traditional or POD routes, publishers today spend little or no money to promote your book.) It is your responsibility.
Now that we have explored the various ways to publish your book in columns you have read over the past several weeks, next we’ll turn to what is perhaps one of the most lucrative categories of writing—commercial writing. See you next week.
Keep writing!
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